The Crying Game.

Because the plot of The Crying Game contains at least three big surprises, the distributors of the film have requested reviewers to forbear from spilling certain beans. 1'11 comply for the most part, but I want to point out that even ill spilled every single bean on view, the surprises that I think really matter to writer-director Neil Jordan cannot be betrayed in print. Sudden incisions into character, ineffabilities of atmosphere, the final emergence of a vision of life: these can be experienced only by watching the movie.

The Crying Game has been called Hitchcockian, but that's misleading. Hitchcock was a master manipulator who, at his best, constructed roller coasters for his audiences to ride. There are some interesting characters in his films but, with a few exceptions, characterization is never the raison d'etre of a Hitchcock movie. The characters exist to be shocked so that we may be shocked. In The Crying Game, shock takes us deeper into character.

The plot fails into three sections with each part ending in a twist. And each surprise so destabilizes the protagonist, Fergus, that he must reorganize his life in order to go on with it. Each time Fergus reorganizes, his life completely changes, both externally and internally. What keeps the movie from falling apart into three unrelated films (aside from the visual consistency and forward motion of Jordan's staging) is our constant apprehension that no matter how often Fergus tries to avoid getting involved in further dangers, some other compulsion (to make amends to the dead, to show compassion to the living) will push him right back into them. In tact, Fergus is, if only half-consciously, on a quest. He, or at least some part of him, is trying to learn how to be an honorable man. And, by the end of the movie, Fergus completely achieves his honor but under circumstances that leave us not knowing whether to laugh at him or weep with him, though a perfectly viable alternative would be to weep at him and laugh with him, for our hero, though of a woeful countenance, never loses his sense of the ridiculous.

It's possible to recapitulate the plot without utterly derusing it. Part 1: An I.R.A. volunteer, Fergus, becomes one of the captors and, eventually, the assigned executioner of a black British soldier. But the good-hearted Fergus cannot keep his heart from going out to the equally bonhomous Jody, who, sure that he is doomed, makes Fergus promise to look up his girl, Dil. Jody is indeed doomed but the way he dies is totally unexpected by him, by Fergus, by any of the other Irish volunteers, and, certainly, by the audience. The catastrophe throws Fergus out of Ireland and, so he thinks, out of the I.R.A. Part 2: In England, Fergus looks up Dil and fails in love with her. She responds but Surprise #2 prevents Fergus and Dil from consummating their mutual longings. After some old comrades-in-arms, including a former girlfriend of Fergus, track down our hero, they threaten Dil in order to coerce the now disaffected young man into collaborating on another assassination attempt. Dil's mistaken jealousy of the I.R.A. moil, Fergus's desperate strategy to save Dil's life, his compulsion to tell her of his part in Jody's death, and the sheer haste and panic involved in any assassination plot all coalesce and result in Surprise #3, a denouement full of misery, joy, left-handed justice, and long-term frustration.

The Crying Game shows how a man saves his soul through fulfilling the obligations love puts on him. And what a love it is that Fergus feels tot Dil by the time this movie concludes: A most unfashionably platonic, painfully hedged-in sort of love. It is more than guilt or prison bars or the expanse of oceans that keeps our hero and heroine from sexual consummation, and when the country-western chestnut, "Stand by Your Man," is heard on the soundtrack under the closing credits, the irony it conveys is sweet, poignant, malicious, and hilarious--all at once ! But, once plot is told and theme is stated. how to describe the aftertaste this movie leaves in the brain'? It's certainly a bittersweet taste but so is that of a thousand-and-one bad movies. What makes The Crying Game so special'? Let me attempt an indirect answer.

Imagine a loving father, cursed with clairvoyance, watching his children fulfill the destinies he's already foreseen. Always he looks on with love, joy, and sorrow, but never does he lift a finger to make sure each reaches the happiest of harbors for he knows it's useless. That's the way Neil Jordan seems to watch his characters move through their destinies. He's created them, he's responsible for them, but he knows that they are the prisoners of Neil Jordan Land where terrible things happen to good people and worse things happen to terrible people and where the night watchman making his rounds never calls out the hour and "Ali's well" but only sings out the Dylan Thomas line, "Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?"

Consider just one visual motif as an example of Jordan's loving irony: the spectral reappearances of Jody in Fergus's thoughts as the Irishman becomes more and more deeply involved with Dil. The first one occurs when Fergus, only briefly acquainted with Dil, sees the silhouette of the girl against her bedroom's nightshade embracing the shadow of Dave, an idiotic roughneck. Jody's ghost, in spotless white sweater and plus fours, now appears bowling a cricket ball (arguing about spoils helped bond the young men during the soldier's captivity) and smiling the most guileless of smiles. At this point, Jody seems like a noble spirit betrayed by his faithless lady. So Fergus must intervene to reverence the memory of his pal. He does so, by winning Dil's love. After their first sexual encounter, Jody's spirit reappears, still smiling, still bowling. All is well, apparently. But right after Fergus's second attempt to make love to Dil, an encounter that blasts all further intimacies, Jody appears just once more. But this time he's not bowling, only tossing a ball up and down. The smile on his face is still good-natured but also knowing, perhaps a bit apologetic, even a bit taunting. "I know you'd like to wring my neck, Fergus," that smile seems to say, "but I couldn't tell you everything about her." Jody the innocent victim has become Jody the presiding spirit of irony.

In one respect, The Crying Game has been a tad overrated. Jordan, a former (and future?) novelist, is still more of a writer than a director. His script is audacious but his execution, though dexterous, is rather conventional in terms of blocking and shot structure. A certain rhythmic tameness makes the first third a little too much like all those other I.R.A. hostage plays and movies that have appeared on Broadway or in movie art houses at least once every lustrum in the last half-century. His best visual work is in the creation of the bar where Dil and Fergus rendezvous and which grows ever more sinister as Fergus keeps learning more about Dil.

Jordan certainly knows how to pick and guide actors. Every member of this cast brings out the doubleness of his or her character. Stephen Rea makes of Fergus both a potentially lethal street fighter and the most innocent of sad sacks. Forest Whittacker, the sleepy Samson, perfectly captures both Jody's innocence and his mischief. Miranda Richardson takes Jude, the blonde pincushion of macho I.R.A. 1outs in the film's first third, and believably turns her into an assertive brunette vamp-assassin in the last. As for Jaye Davidson as Dil...well, I'll just say that Davidson is the latest wonder of the Western World and let you discover this unique creature for yourself. No greater forbearance hath any movie critic than to forgo discussion of the unique Jaye Davidson.